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Cloud Services Brokerage: A Must-Have for Most Organizations

If your company is moving parts of its business to the cloud, you’re probably realizing that it’s not all that simple. Working with many cloud service providers means managing multiple relationships. In fact, if you’re trying to save money or gain efficiency, you’ll have more success if you have a little help ensuring that you get what you pay for – and maybe a little bit more.

Most enterprises are already negotiating multiple contracts with multiple cloud service providers. And multiple contracts mean multiple payments, multiple passwords, multiple data streams, and multiple providers to check up on. That leads to questions about how you make those services work together, or how you unify all your efforts so you can get maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

Enter the Cloud Services Brokerage, or CSB. A cloud services brokerage is a third party company that adds value to cloud services on behalf of cloud service consumers. Their goal is to make the service more specific to a company, or to integrate or aggregate services, to enhance their security, or to do anything which adds a significant layer of value (i.e. capabilities) to the original cloud services being offered.

A CSB can make cloud services more valuable because they work closely with cloud providers to get price breaks or access to more information about how a service works. In addition, they have more experience working with multiple providers and across many consumer scenarios. Instead of spending time and money to address these problems internally, consumers can leverage solutions offered by CSBs that allow organizations to focus on other pressing business needs instead. A viable CSB provider can make it less expensive, easier, safer and more productive for companies to navigate, integrate, consume and extend cloud services, particularly when they span multiple, diverse cloud services providers.

A CSB is what gets the consumer out of the “between a rock and a hard place” problem of not having to become an expert in the details of how a cloud service is delivered, but also not wanting to simply take the cloud provider’s word completely on faith for how things should work.

CSBs also can step in and do triage when a set of cloud services running in your organization has a problem. Cloud service providers may say that the problem is somewhere other than with them. CSBs can work to minimize these situations by working closely with each provider, isolating your organization from the problem.

For some organizations, the role of the IT department may even shift to become a broker for use of cloud services. They will ensure that users of cloud services are not signing duplicate contracts and that when a SaaS solution needs to be integrated with other business systems that someone is there to help. Sound compelling? Think about it. As IT staff loses systems and software to manage, brokerage becomes the natural evolution for their role in the organization.

So whether you rely on an external CSB or start looking for one in-house, it’s important to recognize that CSBs must be part of your company’s cloud equation for maximum results. Otherwise, the benefits you realize from moving services outside the organization may very well be hampered by the mess created inside.

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- Benoit Lheureux, the Gartner analyst who is championing their CSB coverage, also did an excellent case study on The Men’s Wearhouse and their use of StrikeIron as a CSB. This one is a paid report but worth it.

Absolutely!! one of the biggest fallicies in cloud computing is that an organization will have only one cloud service provider. Every organization that wants to use cloud efficiently will need to leverage cloud services brokerage. this function will either be done internally or it will be outsourced to a CSB

I agree completely with this recommendations, and would like to suggest some refinement to the concept of a Cloud Service Broker. There is huge potential, with the CSB structure, to establish standardized SLAs, assessment templates and solution architecture models needed to manage the transition from legacy apps to a managed service model. The Federal CIOs have suggest a public/private partnership structure organized as a 501C6 non-profit that is free of any potential conflicts of interest and structured to pool resources and expertise from many communities of practice. Such an organization is already coming together called the IT Acquisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC.org), which has incorporated a dozen plus existing non-profits to accelerate maturity and leverage existing frameworks already in play like the Acquisition Assurance Method (AAM).

A CSB should not be in the business of competing with any of the suppliers so as to remain 100% objective. It should also be void of any buy/sell agreements which would also compromise its objectivity. The IT-AAC meets this criteria, and ready to take on the role of a Cloud Honest Broker.

I think that organisations will use two types of broker – a technical broker who will help them to access multiple clouds in a consistent and easy-to-use manner, and a “cloud broker-dealer” which will allow them to pay for their cloud services under one invoice (from the cloud broker-dealer), with payment terms that suit them. This cloud broker-dealer will be able to help compare prices between different clouds (as they will know what is being used) and can offer pricing for periods of usage in the future that may be better than the pricing offered by the cloud provider. This is normal in many other markets…

I found the term “Cloud food chain” really fit in this discussion. It seem that the cloud consumer must find it cloud broker before searching for the cloud service vendor (operator) – hence the cloud broker (or should we call it your “cloud manager” – http://www.quora.com/Cloud-Management/Is-a-Cloud-Manager-the-same-thing-as-a-Cloud-Broker) positioned higher on the “cloud food chain”.

CSBis a nice concept and quite a lot traditional system integration companies are already built service offering around this. But the key challenge is integration and end to end lifecycle managment on top of the brokerage services. The seamless integration sounds quite simple but its implemention can defeat the multi vendor cloud adoption business case. The multi layer integration such as single sign-on, seamless data flow from one cloud based application to other, integrated billing, single contract etc. will need some more time to mature. Moreover there are not many enterprise grade SaaS products available in the market yet and cloud brokerage is applicable for the enterprise customers, SMBs won’t be investing in such complex and expensive integration on cloud

Absolutely! At Statera, we had clients that asked us to not only set up but manage multiple cloud service providers for them, so we are now offering cloud service brokerage http://bit.ly/XRImhO to implement, upgrade, and manage multiple cloud platforms, on one bill, and let our clients focus on their core business. See www.statera.com for more information.

However what about security (DLP, enhanced policy control) and cross service provide analytics? Is any CSB thinking of that? Who provides the support, is the cloud service, or the CSB?

(Disclaimer: I am from Armor5, a company specializing in providing Zero Touch solution to cross cloud service analytics, security (Data Leak Prevention, Enhanced policy control, Risk based authentication) to name a few, help chat).